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flock2000 (666) writes "New study conducted by norwegian researchers finds (again) that changes in cosmic rays most likely do not contribute to climate change. Previously, other researchers have claimed to have found a link between cosmic rays and surface temperatures. Read the article at ScienceDaily"Link to Original Source

dataxtream (1292440) writes "The world's first refrigerated beach is to be built at a luxury hotel in Dubai, located along the southern coast of the Persian Gulf. The beach will include heat-absorbing pipes under the sand along with large wind blowers, which will keep tourists cool and guard their feet against the hot sand. Half of me says these guys need a reality check, the other half wants to go there."Link to Original Source

Agreed.
I'm a INTJ developer. While I lack the empathy component, I've analyzed the work of Jung, Briggs, Myers-Briggs, and Kiersey. It holds true as a good rule of thumb. I find my relations with other people are strongly influenced by N vs. S and I vs. E distinctions. I find myself having an especially hard time communicating with S types.
Like most stereotypes, the MBTI is useful for putting a person in context. But for me, individual character is always going to be the final judge.

PizzaFace (593587) writes "It's Jhannet's 19th birthday, so her boyfriend borrows a camcorder to memorialize the occasion, and they head to the mall. They goof around, recording each other and the Chick-fil-A cows in the food court, then decide to catch the Transformers matinee, which started a few minutes earlier. During a big action scene, Jhannet takes the camcorder and records a 20-second clip to show her little brother. A few minutes later, cops who were called by the manager come in with flashlights, arrest Jhannet, confiscate the camcorder, and, at the behest of Regal Cinemas, charge her with film piracy. "I was terrified," said Jhannet. "I was crying. I've never been in trouble before." If convicted, she could be sentenced to a year in prison and a $2,500 fine. The police say they lack discretion because Regal Cinemas chose to prosecute: "They were the victim in this case, and they felt strongly enough about it." The National Association of Theatre Owners supports Regal's "zero-tolerance" prosecution standard: "We cannot educate theater managers to be judges and juries in what is acceptable. Theater managers cannot distinguish between good and bad stealing.""

SoyChemist (1015349) writes "Hollywood is not known for providing a wealth of positive female role models. Danica McKellar, the actress that played Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years and Elsie Snuffin on The West Wing, has written a math book for teenage girls. Math Doesn't Suck is in the style of a teen magazine. It even includes a horoscope, cute doodles of shoes and jewelry, and testimonials from attractive young career women that use math at work. It focuses on fractions and pre-algebra and uses mnemonics like calling a reciprocal a "refliprocal", because you just take the fraction and flip it upside down. Wired interviewed McKellar about the new book and her crusade to eliminate the achievement gap between boys and girls in math courses. McKellar graduated Summa Cum Laude from UCLA. While studying there, she co-authored a proof and presented it at a conference. After she and Mayim Bialik — star of Blossom and a PhD in neuroscience — appeared in a 20/20 episode about intellectual actresses, several literary agents came knocking on her door."

i_like_spam (874080) writes "Commentary at Nature Climate Change describes an on-going debate about the energy savings associated with the background colors used by high-traffic websites such as Google and the NYTimes. Some back of the envelope calculations have suggested energy savings of 750 Megawatt hours per year if Google switched their background from white to black. Google responded by creating Blackle. Other calculations by the Wall Street Journal, however, suggest minimal energy savings. Who is right in this debate? And, should designers also consider potential energy savings when choosing colors for their websites?"

juct writes "Heise describes a new demo showing how Firefox running under Windows XP SP2 can be abused to start applications. For this to work, however, Internet Explorer 7 needs to be installed. This severe security problem promises another round in the 'who-is-to-blame-war' between Mozilla and Microsoft. Mozilla currently is leading the race for a patch, as they have one ready in their bugzilla database. 'The authors of the demo note that there are many further examples of such vulnerabilities via registered URIs. What is so far visible is just "the tip of the iceberg". They state that registered URIs are tantamount to a remote gateway into your computer. To be on the safe side, users should, in the authors' opinion, deregister all unnecessary URIs - without, however, elucidating which are superfluous.'"

BWJones writes "An article in the New England Journal of Medicine that describes a cat in Providence, Rhode Island that appears to be able to detect when a patient in a nursing home is about to die. BBC link here. CBS link here. The cat following cues or small molecular signals goes into the room of a dying patient, curls up next to them and begins to purr in the hours before the patient dies.
Cats may be better detectors of metabolomic status than we give them credit for."Link to Original Source

yoshm writes "A student at the Technion in Israel is making helium-inflatable solar cell balloons to collect solar energy cheaply as they float above your house. Same guy has developed a cheap passive tool to extract fresh water from the air based on ancient Nabatean techniques."Link to Original Source

An anonymous reader writes "Bruce Crower has made a fascinating modification to traditional internal combustion engines: a fifth and sixth stroke. His six-stroke engine injects water into the hot cylinder to achieve a second power stroke with the expanding steam. The engine "burns" equal amounts of gasoline and water, thereby reducing fuel consumption by a whopping 40%. Could this technology the future of petroleum powered vehicles? More information is available on Wikipedia."Link to Original Source

Ben Coppin writes "Darker Matter's three part interview with Douglas Adams from 1979 lay unnoticed in a drawer for 28 years, until it was published by the new online science fiction magazine. The interview has generated so much interest (much of it coming from Slashdot's coverage, by the way) that we've decided to publish a fourth part — and it's not just the dregs. There's some really interesting stuff in there about how Douglas Adams considered himself neurotic, shy and self-conscious, and why it's surprising that the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy ended up being as good as it was.

The new draft incorporates the feedback received from the general public and official discussion committees since the release of the previous draft on March 28, 2007. FSF executive director Peter Brown said, "We've made a few very important improvements based on the comments we've heard, most notably with license compatibility. Now that the license is almost finished, we can look forward to distributing the GNU system under GPLv3, and making its additional protections available to the whole community."

The FSF has also published an essay by Richard Stallman on the benefits of upgrading to GPLv3. "Keeping a program under GPLv2 won't create problems," he writes. "The reason to migrate is because of the existing problems which GPLv3 will fix, such as tivoization, DRM, and threats from software patents. . . . Further advantages of GPLv3 include better internationalization, gentler termination, support for BitTorrent, and compatibility with the Apache license.""Link to Original Source

An anonymous reader writes "A press release from EPFL as well as other sources are reporting that an international team has factored a 1024 bit product of primes using the special number field sieve. Once again time to increase your GPG key lengths."